Warning: The following contains spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen, Episode 51, “Perfect Preparation”, now streaming on Crunchyroll.

Late last year, I wrote about Gachiakuta and how refreshing it felt as an anime-only to go into a new series from my favorite studio with the manga’s first three volumes fresh in my memory. It felt cool to experience what manga readers must go through every time a new adaptation comes out, and judging its early episodes with some added context/authority offered some nuance to my time with it that I wasn’t used to. Now, unfortunately, the anime quickly outpaced what I was able to read in the manga, mostly because no bookstore around me had Volume 4 for some reason. Thankfully, just a few months later, I would be subject to an even greater catharsis as Jujutsu Kaisen: The Culling Game Part 1 began airing.

With Gachiakuta, it was something new to me, and whether I was reading it or watching it, I hadn’t fully decided if I liked it or not yet. With Jujutsu Kaisen, on the other hand, I had already read the manga to completion last year while waiting for the show to return, which was certainly an experience to say the least. And for all the insane battles, cool characters (both wasted and not), and the at-times cumbersome culmination of the series intricate magic system, there was really only one arc that I was desperately hungry for above all the others… The Perfect Preparation Arc. In other words, the moment Maki became the coolest character.

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